Mansour said that he will meet with the president of the Security Council and other council members to explain the destructive consequences of the Israeli annexation plan.

“We will ask the Security Council to intensify their pressure on the Israeli government that is fully backed by the United States administration to stop the implementation of the annexation plan,” said Mansour.

“The Palestinian leadership meets to decide on how the Palestinian side will respond to the Israeli annexation plan once it is implemented,” said Seidam, adding that the Palestinians need to be united and boost their internal front.

Indian officials contend that the more than two month-long lockdown, the largest in the world, kept the mortality rates down.

They also cite effective clinical management and less severe infections in India, which has a population that skews younger.

They have denied allegations of under-reporting COVID-19-related deaths.

The case fatality ratio – or proportion of deaths to the total number of cases – has been steady at 2.8 per cent, which is lower than the global mortality rate of 5.8 per cent, the Hindustan Times daily reported.

However, experts warned that the densely populated country had yet to see the peak of the pandemic.

People in these cities have taken to social media to talk about patients struggling to receive medical attention, with some hospitals contending they did not have enough beds left.

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal however said there was no shortage of beds and strict action would be taken against some hospitals that had turned away patients.

Many new cases were reported from rural areas after hundreds of thousands of daily-wage migrant workers left cities and towns under lockdown to return to their villages, having found themselves without work during the pandemic.

Authorities began allowing their movement out of the cities in early May, leading to chaotic and crowded scenes at border checkpoints.

The government has been easing the lockdown, which began on March 25, over the past weeks in an attempt to revive the economy.

The restrictions are now being enforced in containment or high-risk zones, while marketplaces, businesses as well as industrial activity have been allowed to reopen and road, rail and air travel have resumed.

The government also announced new rules for re-opening of malls, restaurants, hotels and places of worship with restrictions on large gatherings from Monday.

The country’s eastern Punjab province is the most affected region with 35,308 cases followed by southern Sindh province with 34,889 cases.

The northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province reported 12,459 cases and 541 deaths. At least 5,776 cases were recorded in southwestern Balochistan province, while 4,323 cases were reported in the capital city Islamabad.

Punjab province recorded 659 deaths, followed by Sindh with 615 deaths, the statistics said, adding that Pakistan has conducted 660,508 tests officially so far.

The Pakistani government started to ease the lockdown from May 9, aiming at mitigating the influence on the labor class and the poor in the country.

Earlier on Thursday, Pakistan decided to take strict administrative actions for the implementation and enforcement of the standard operating procedure formed by the government to contain the spread of the coronavirus amid a surge in new COVID-19 cases across the country.

Earlier in the day, British government’s chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance told reporters in a virtual briefing that the R-number — the average number of people that will contract coronavirus from an infected person — for England was between 0.7 and one, while it remained between 0.7 and 0.9 for Britain as a whole.

The latest data suggested that northwestern England is an area for concern and some regions may have R-number above one, at which point the epidemic will begin to grow in these communities, the Guardian newspaper reported.